Newspaper employee dies after street attack

MOSCOW - A newspaper employee in a Moscow suburb has died after being beaten near his home in the latest of a string of attacks on journalists in Russia, his editor said Wednesday.

Sergei Protazanov was found by a passer-by on Sunday as he lay on a sidewalk in the town of Khimki, said Anatoly Yurov, editor of the newspaper Grazhdanskoye Soglasiye.

Protazanov, who had a prosthetic arm and worked as a page designer for the paper, died at home Monday a day after doctors discharged him from hospital, Yurov said.

The RIA-Novosti news agency cited police as denying Protazanov had been beaten and saying he died from accidental poisoning. Police refused to comment to The Associated Press.

Yurov said six journalists had been severely beaten in Khimki in the past two years. He said Protazanov had been compiling an issue that included reports on alleged falsifications in local mayoral elections and he linked the attack to Protazanov’s work.

He said that Protazanov had told him by telephone from hospital on Sunday that he had been attacked. Protazanov told him from home on Monday that “Everything hurts – on the inside and on the outside. I cannot move,” Yurov said.

Yurov said that police told Protazanov’s wife that her husband’s death was probably caused either by food he ate at the hospital or medication.